Saturday, Feb 11th
Last update02:23:27 AM GMT
Science Glance
Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail.
“The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” he wrote.
Astronomers have detected a rocky "super-Earth" planet orbiting a nearby star in a region where life could possibly exist, a finding that led one of the team from UC Santa Cruz to predict there must be billions more of them in the Milky Way.
"Detecting this planet so near implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets," said Steven Vogt, a veteran UC Santa Cruz planet hunter who is a member of the discovery team and is now completing a new telescope called the Automated Planet Finder at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose.
Imagine you could step out of our Milky Way a few million light-years and take a look back. This is the sort of view you might see. That is because this dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is of a galaxy that is thought to resemble our own.
Known as NGC 1073, and lying 55 million light-years away in the constellation of Cetus, it is a spiral galaxy, like so many classic “star cities”, but has a distinctive bar across its middle. This bar apparently denotes a galaxy that has moved on from being a bright young thing and headed into middle age.
"X-rays give us a penetrating view into the world of atoms and molecules," said physicist Nina Rohringer ofGermany's Max Planck Society in a news release last week.
NASA's prolific planet-hunting spacecraft has hit the jackpot again, discovering 11 new planetary systems with 26 confirmed alien planets among them.
The findings nearly double the number of bona fide planets found outside our solar system by the Kepler space observatory.
A powerful solar flare has unleashed the biggest radiation storm in nearly seven years as the Sun bombards the Earth with huge amounts of energy. Large swathes of the planet were hit by the geomagnetic storm amid fears the biggest storm since 2005 could disrupt important communications.
Astronomers warned the storm could affect airline routes, power grids and satellites with the worst of the storm likely to go north of Earth.
The United States government recently blocked virologist Ron Fouchier from releasing the blueprints to develop heavily weaponized H5N1 bird flu virus thanks to pressure stemming from the alternative media, but now a new group of scientific labs have begun to recreate the findings and may release them to the public.
Dr. Thomas Inglesby, a bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, notes that to release the weaponized virus is a severe threat to world health:
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